On January 18, 2013,
in ITO, offshore,
by Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Editor

Customer contact centers following certain practices outperform those that don’t follow them, according to a Wipro study. For example, organizations that schedule their agents across channels and processes report higher utilization rates compared to those who don’t, according to Bonet Lobo, program manager, Wipro BPO. Similarly, those routing calls to the right agent, immediately seeking feedback after an interaction, allowing seamless channel hopping and having screen pops “significantly outperform those that don’t in customer satisfaction scores,” adds David Volpe, practice head-CRM WCS at Wipro.

Knowing best practices is important because customer contact centers have become strategic to organizations. Today, they… Read the rest

The economic news out of Washington has been dreary. But there’s a bright ray of economic sunshine in Texas. Alsbridge, the global leader in data-driven benchmarking, outsourcing consulting and network advisory services for CIOs, has been growing. Now the firm is poised for another growth spurt.

Inc. magazine listed Alsbridge on its list of “500 Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies.” That’s because in the last five years the Dallas-based company has completed four acquisitions to fuel its double digit annual growth. The latest addition: Telwares, a leading San Francisco consulting firm that provides network optimization and transformational services to global… Read the rest

Before Lehman Brothers disintegrated in September 2008, investment banks and wealth management firms enjoyed returns on equity of as high as 20 percent. The cost of capital is typically around 10 percent. “It was a very profitable business based on the leverage those companies used,” explains Sud, Wipro’s head of financial services, BPO, for the US.

Today, however, the cost of capital is basically the same. But these firms have struggled to get their profitability to match that percentage, according to Sud.

One huge cost center is back office operations. Sud estimates that large banking conglomerates have up to 7,000… Read the rest

During the last two decades, we have witnessed many technology advancements that have allowed various levels of automation providing HR executives access to vast amounts of data—all which essentially made our lives easier.

For example, in the 1990′s it was common practice for organizations to license software to manage their businesses. These licenses required costly efforts to customize the software to accommodate the individual business needs as well as accumulated the expense of huge amounts of infrastructure and human capital required to operate it.

During the early 2000′s service providers entered the picture, enabling organizations to outsource portions of (or… Read the rest

Staffing a contact center historically has been tricky. More often than not, the outsourcing supplier overstaffs or understaffs the floor since it is unable to predict incoming call and non-voice volumes accurately on a day-to-day basis.

Yet proper staffing is crucial to building a successful operation that adheres to service level agreements and enhances the customer experience. How do you predict accurate, granular volumes so you can staff properly?

“Forecasting brings a predictive edge to customers,” says Rachana Grover, general manager, analytics, research and social media, which is part of the Knowledge Services Division for Wipro BPO.

Buyer A opened an offshore captive five years ago. It currently has 350 seats. It took almost two years to break even. Now, other companies are poaching the staff. Attrition is becoming a problem.

Buyer B has customer-facing activities that require high touch. The company would love to offshore the process but is afraid to give up visibility and control. And it believes no one at the provider has a deep enough understanding of its customers like its staff does to let them handle it.

Genpact just opened its fourth U.S. operations center in Richardson, Texas on April 4. It joins centers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Irvine, California; and Danville, Illinois. Scott McConnell, senior vice president, Americas for Genpact says the U.S. is “the fastest growing country based on the percentage of people being hired.”

In fact, McConnell says the company is “investing more and more of its leadership in the U.S.” Genpact has just under 3,000 people employed in the U.S. across all but eight states.

Why is this important? What does it say about the direction of outsourcing?

In recent work with a client, a major IT sourcing provider, I discovered how important organization really is! Getting organized to begin a transition with multiple towers is critical to your success and perhaps more importantly, to reducing transition management efforts.

In this particular case it was clear the transition planning was aligned by tower rather than for an overall transition effort. The provider, with good intentions, created a transition reporting structure with leads for each tower. The leads in turn created their own transition plans, in some cases a Word document rather than a MS Project plan. This would… Read the rest